Michigan Ethics Centers, Initiatives and Resources

Michigan is home to several ethics enterprises. The oldest and most illustrious of the ethics centers is Michigan State University's Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. To be sure, the reputation of the MSU Center has grown as the work and writings of several of its faculty have become standards for an emerging field. No accolades are more well-deserved than the attention given to the work of Howard Brody, a former director of The Center, who helped to establish and legitimize the discipline of the medical humanities. New centers and programs in bioethics or in health care have followed. Especially worthy of mention are the interdisciplinary studies and research coming from the University of Michigan's Center for Law, Ethics and Health as well as the work being published through the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine.

And then there are the efforts of those groups who have come after the initial push from MSU. From the business ethics centers at Grand Valley State and Eastern Michigan University, the legal ethics focus at the Thomas Cooley Law School, to the more broadly-based and applied ethics programs of Central Michigan and Western Michigan. Each one of these programs offers some unique and innovative efforts to expand ethics.

Take, for example, Central Michigan's Court in the Classroom project and the winning teams of Western Michigan annually competing in the Ethics Bowl.    

Finally, our ethics center and intitiative locator includes the Michigan Civil Service's State Board of Ethics. 

We haven't the faintest idea whether having more ethics centers, initiatives and resources indicates that the people living in a particular state or region think more ethics thoughts and are more ethical than those without them.

After all, there were bad citizens in the place that gave us citizens: Athens.

And when we last counted (check out our national and global links page: www.a2ethics.org/national resources),  there were many more ethics centers in our nation's capital. We would guess that Washington would be the last place any citizen would name as the capital of ethics.

If you are familiar and know of an ethics center, initiative or resource in Michigan that we should be aware of and should look into, please let us know.